Hollywood writers threaten to walk picket line ... again
Hollywood is facing a cliffhanger after members of the Writers Guild of America voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike that could begin as soon as this week. The union and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers continue to grapple over issues including compensation and health care.
The previous writers’ strike lasted 100 days in 2007-08 and was costly to the businesses that serve Hollywood and to consumers expecting to be entertained. Here’s a look at how it could play out if writers trade their laptops for picket signs.
THE ISSUE
The changing nature of how television is delivered to viewers is a major reason for the impasse.
More than 400 series were available on broadcast, cable and rapidly expanding streaming platforms this season, double that of six years ago. But shows have fewer episodes than the roughly two-dozen per season once common on network TV, and short runs of as few as eight to 12 episodes mean less money for writers getting paid on a perepisode basis.
Contracts binding writers exclusively to a series have cut into their compensation as well.
According to the WGA, which has about 20,000 members, median earnings for writers dropped between the 2013-14 season and 2015-16, and more and more scribes are finding it difficult to make a living under current deals. The guild is seeking a wage increase and wants salary minimums to apply equally to streaming, cable and broadcast. Health care, an issue that echoes beyond Hollywood, is also on the table. The two sides are at odds over what concessions the guild would make in return for producers contributing more to the health plan.
TELEVISION
TV viewers won’t be laughing much if writers take a hike, with the most immediate impact on late-night talk and comedy shows including Saturday Night Live.
In the 2007 walkout, shows including NBC’s Tonight and CBS’ The Late Show with David Letterman went dark for two months. They returned during the strike either without writers or, in Letterman’s case, with a separate guild deal through his production company. That won’t be an option for CBS’ current Late Show host, Stephen Colbert, because a CBS entity now produces it.
For prime-time TV, the strike would come as the fall-to-spring broadcast season winds down. But with year-round programming now commonplace, networks and cable channels likely will call on reality shows to help fill the void.
Streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon could be winners because their original series tend to be produced further in advance of release, entertainment lawyer Jonathan Handel said.
THE BIG SCREEN
The slower pace of film production, where it takes up to three years or more for the biggest movies to be made, means a strike wouldn’t cause as much immediate havoc in the movie business. But it would still greatly alter the well-ordered pipelines of Hollywood productions, big and small.
Most significant would be the impact on large franchises that might not have a script quite ready for shooting. That leaves studios with a choice of whether to press pause or push ahead with an unfinished screenplay.
The 2007 strike affected the making of movies like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the James Bond film Quantum of Solace and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. All of those films received poor reviews, and many of the filmmakers and stars involved later said the movies simply didn’t have the screenplay or the writers that they needed.
Some films will be rushing to get scripts ready before any potential strike, but others will inevitably be left in limbo.